[How to] fund your cruncher's utility bill OR how to make money using bitcoin

[jcool]

Hey guys,

haven't been on here a lot lately, I know. Sorry about that, busy times...
Anyway, I found out about a little something called "bitcoin" yesterday. In short, it's an alternative sort of "internet currency" that has been around since 2009 (if only someone had mentioned it to me 1-2 years ago...). The idea is to trade the bitcoin (BTC) for real money like USD or €, or even gold. Some websites also offer products and services that you can pay by using bitcoins: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

While this concept isn't new, there is something about bitcoin that makes it VERY interesting to us crunchers - you can generate ("mine") bitcoins by using your computer. Similar to crunching, it uses your computer's resources to generate these "coins".

Now, I've been at this for a day now, and I don't know everything yet, but I can tell you it works. I'm also going to tell you what you need to know in a nutshell, so everyone can profit while it lasts. Ok then, let's get started with the How to.

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What you need:

1. One or more fairly recent, ATI-based GPUs. HD5xxx and up are best at this, Nvidias are a lot worse, CPU is useless
1a. The right driver. Be sure to download the current ATI driver WITH APP, else it won't work. You can also download the OpenCL SDK separately (http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx). With HD5xxx cards, performance is supposed to be best with the older 2.1 SDK (I can confirm this). For HD6xxx, use the current 2.4 SDK because 2.1 won't work with them.
2. Good GPU cooling, as with all GPU crunching/mining projects
3. Preferably cheap electricity, but it's still worth running even in more expensive regions (like Germany...), provided you have the right hardware

Performance is measured in MHash/s (Mega-Hashes per second). Here is an overview of what different cards can do: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

As we can see, HD5870 and HD5850 cards are among the best performers, closely followed by current HD68 and HD69 series cards.

Setting it up
Setting up is quite simple really. First, you have to make a choice between joining a so-called mining pool or going solo. I strongly recommend using a mining pool, because that will provide you with a steady payout and work better in general.

0. You need to download the bitcoin core app that acts as a "digital wallet", it contains the key where it saves the amount of bitcoins that you have earned. Download here: http://www.bitcoin.org/
Starting up, it will show your bitcoin address (a long key that is generated randomly).

1. Assuming you are joining a mining pool, just go to their website and register. I use the deepnet pool, which is currently the biggest one and also has the best (lowest) fees from what I could tell: https://deepbit.net
Edit: I now use the BCT Guild pool, which has no fees at all! Recommended (you can still donate a % to help keep it running, but you don't have to): http://btcguild.com
When creating your deepbit or BCT guild account, you have to enter your bitcoin address so the pool knows where to send your coins to. Just copy & paste the address key from the bitcoin core app you previously installed.
You will also need to set up a "worker" in your deepbit or BCT guild account, but that's kinda straight-forward really.

2. After you have created your mining pool account, download and unpack the GUI miner tool to a destination of your choosing: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3878.0

3. Start guiminer.exe, you'll find the following window:

http://img4.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/guiminer1298w3ot7uf.jpg

4. Select "deepbit" or "BCT Guild" in the "Server" drop-down menu and enter the e-mail (deepbit) or name (BCT Guild) and password matching the worker's which you created on deepbit/BCT Guild

5. Under "Device", select your GPU. It will show your CPU and all available GPUs.

6. Optionally, you can add extra flags. For ATI HD5xxx and above, the "-v -w128" flags are supposed to be ideal. Don't know about other cards, check the list I posted in the beginning.

7. That's it - just hit "start mining" and you GPU will start working.

8. If you have more than 1 GPU, set up a 2nd (3rd, 4th etc) worked thread. "File" --> "New OpenCL Miner" --> choose any name you like (I used "GPU2") and set it up exactly the same way as the first one, bit one difference: you have to choose the 2nd card under "Device":

http://www.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/guiminer2ub9ave5y6o.jpg

Under "View" --> "Show Summary" you'll see a summary of all running GPUs:

http://www.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/guiminer3davygmehiu.jpg

A note on multi-GPU setups:
- works best with Crossfire (or SLI) disabled
- every card needs at least 1 monitor, KVM port or VGA dummy plug connected to it or the GUI miner won't show it under "devices", much like FAH
- mixing different cards in 1 system is not a problem

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What are the "WUs" exactly? What is it all for? How does it work?

They're not "WUs" in the classical sense. Instead, they're basically a cryptographic way of packaging the records of all recent bitcoin transactions since the last block, making it secure through a bunch of probability theory, etc.

Basically what mining is doing is taking the list of transactions (actually a compressed form of it), adding in a few addition pieces of information (last block ID, timestamp, client version, client computing it, difficulty, etc.), plus a random number (called a nonce). As a whole, all of this information is SHA256 hashed twice with the goal of achieving an output value composed of 00000000XXXXXXXXXX... where the number of zeroes required are determined by the difficulty and the Xs are left to whatever value they may be. The input's nonce is incremented until the output happens to match such an acceptable value.

Once the hash's output reaches the accepted goal, it's sent to the whole network as the official next block, where it's used as a header to the log of transactions going with it. Just to note, there's additional confirmation that continues for the next so many blocks to make sure something underhanded didn't happen, like someone generated a bunch of blocks targeting a really easy difficulty or something.

What mining is all about is: the first person who generates one of these valid solutions first gets a pre-determined "prize", which right now is 50BTC. However, view it as whoever is "lucky" enough to generate a valid solution first, since the transaction log is continuously changing and hashing is a one-way function. This means that no matter how long you've been trying things, it's basically brute-forcing, you don't know how much longer there is to go.

:up: to rcofell for the great explanation

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Performance tuning tipps:

- Overclocking your GPU core is very efficient to raise your score, especially on cards like the HD5750/5770/5850
- You can lower your memory clock to save power and keep your card cooler, it doesn't affect hashing performance
- You do NOT need a high bandwidth slot (ie PCIe x16) for optimal performance. In fact, I just ripped open a few x1 slots today and put 5750's in - performance is normal :D
- there seems to be an issue where the GPU client takes up an entire CPU thread even though it doesn't really do anything, observed primarily on multi GPU setups under Win7 64Bit. Try to use 32bit windows, or Windows XP, or Linux (and report your findings please)
- if your card runs too hot on air cooling, consider lowering the GPU core voltage (only available on some models) or adjusting the fan speed using CCC or MSI Afterburner (http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm)

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Ok, now that we got it running & producing - what the hell do we do with it?

First off, check your total Mhash rate. Here is a calculator that shows your estimated output if you enter your individual hash rate: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

It will also show your projected earnings in BCT and USD.
Bitcoin is like a "stock" that changes in value, see here for current exchange rates: http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/

Once you have earned enough, you'll see a balance in your bitcoin core app.
There are several possibilities to "sell" your bitcoins for real money. I haven't tried a lot of them, but here are a few:

https://mtgox.com/
https://bitmarket.eu/ (for us european folks)
https://www.bitcoinmarket.com/
http://bitcoinme.com/
https://www.bitcoin2cc.com/

I'm sure there's a lot more, just try for yourself and report back.

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Problems & solutions

I see that many people are still confused on many things. I am still learning as well, but here are some of the most common issues and how to solve/react to them.

CPU usage is through the roof and/or BOINC is slowing down GUI miner
Your poclbm.exe tasks are using up an entire CPU thread per card? This is a bug that happens mainly on Windows 7 x64 with multiple GPUs. Single GPU miners do not have this problem. 32Bit Windows didn't help for me - WinXP might work. Running Linux definitely helps.
However, there is at least a partial work around: If you lock the affinity of each poclbm.exe instance to the same CPU core (and not all cores), all running miners will share that one CPU thread/core and not use up more than 1 in total. It's not ideal but better than losing 2, 3, 4 etc threads.
If WCG is slowing down the GUIminer, either increase the priority of the running poclbm.exe threads or leave 1 CPU thread/core free via BOINC settings.

I can't connect to a pool, it keeps saying username/password wrong
Make sure you use the worker name which you created on the pool's website as username, NOT your login data to the pool website


I can't connect to a pool, it keeps saying RPC error
The pool might be temporarily down. Or you may be experiencing network trouble. Also make sure port 8332 is forwarded through your various firewalls. Not needed if uPnP is enabled.

The bitcoin core app doesn't want to show any blocks/connections and bitcoin transfers to my wallent don't seem to work either
Make sure port 8332 is forwarded through your various firewalls and/or enable uPnP. BCT transfer will only work correctly once all blocks are connected & shown (currently 128673 blocks, value is increasing so it must show more than that in your bitcoin core client)

Where is my bitcoin credit actually stored? Can I use the bitcoin app to transfer bitcoins on more than 1 computer?
Yes, you can. All your transactions and credit are stored in a file called "wallet.dat". On Win7, it is located under C:\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin. If you want to use your wallet on another computer, simply install the bitcoin core app to that other computer and then copy over your wallet.dat file - done.
Also make sure to back up your wallet.dat file frequently (every 1-2 weeks) so you won't lose your credits in case ur machine crashes!

The address shown in "my bitcoin address" is constantly changing - what does that mean and do I have to change the bitcoin address in my pool's settings to correspond to the new address?
This is normal, and a sort of anonymity feature of the bitcoin network. A new address is usually generated after a successful transfer in order to preserve your anonymity. You can also manually create new addresses by hitting the "new" button next to your current address. But don't worry, payouts will still reach your wallet safely through the old address, so no need to go update the address on the pool all the time.

GUIminer won't start, showing an error message like this: "the application has failed to start because it's side-by-side configuration is incorrect"
I've gotten that error myself on Win 2008 R2. I fixed it by downloading & installing the Microsoft C++ 2008 SP1 x86 library (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2). GUIminer needs it to run, and you need to install the x86 version I just linked even if you are on a x64 OS. Windows 7 users do not need to do this, as C++ 2008 is already there.

GUIminer does start, but it says there are no OpenCL devices detected
Make sure your GPU(s) support OpenCL (ATI HD4xxx and up, Nvidia G80 and newer). If you just installed your brand new ATI drivers and still get the error, try manually installing ONLY the OpenCL part of the driver located at C:\ATI\[...]\Packages\Apps\OpenCL[32/64]\OpenCL.msi
The C:\ATI folder structure is being deployed by executing the Catalyst installer package, so if you don't have it or already deleted it, just re-run the latest Catalyst installer.

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Ok folks, that's all for now - bed time for me.
Just thought you'd like to know. By running what I already had lying around (3x HD5870, 2x HD5770, 1x HD4850) I am currently earning around 25€ a day, increased electricity included. I already converted a few bitcoins to € and yes, it is real - people are using bitcoins to trade, and are actually buying them. For now...


So long

J

[Otis11]

Ah... And I don't have a single ATI GPU... if this turns out I might get one just to experiment. Gonna wait for more results first.

Thanks for the guide! :up:

[don_xvi]

Awesome writeup for us! I've got my 5870 working!
The one thing you could edit is to clarify that you need the OpenCL APP, which some may have elected not to download if they were just using their card for graphics. If you don't have OpenCL installed, the GUI miner will inform you there are no OpenCL devices detected. The download page for the GUI miner pointed me to an ATI OpenCL page, but it would have been easier to just download the version of the drivers with the OpenCL included (they have two versions on the driver download page).
Stock (I think) 5870 is pulling in 350 Mh/s.

[don_xvi]

Note! From the wiki page on mining performance:

AMD

To get the maximum performance use the 2.1 release of the ATI Stream SDK. 2.2 wastes CPU time, and 2.3/2.4 drop mining performance by 5-10% unless using the Phoenix phatk kernel.

I'll hunt on that tomorrow.

[CaptMorgan]

Without doing any searching before typing I do recall reading a little about Bitcoin- that it is actually substantial and has some financial dudes worried

[shoota]

What do those websites do with your bitcoins once they pay you for them?

[don_xvi]

What does the buyer do with your car after you sell it?
I'd prefer he not fill it with diesel fuel and fertilizer, I guess, but as long as the money's green!

[CedricFP]

So why are people buying bitcoins now? In the hopes that this new currency won't flop on its face?

[shoota]

What does the buyer do with your car after you sell it?
I'd prefer he not fill it with diesel fuel and fertilizer, I guess, but as long as the money's green!

I ask because if they are willing to buy it then that makes me think they know something. Maybe bitcoins are worth a lot in some other aspect or market or something.. maybe they are just stock piling them as an investment.

[NKrader]

finally a reason to purchase ati!

:sofa:

[CedricFP]

Also, do the mining pools pay out in bitcoins or in hard currency?

It strikes me as odd that people are gambling on a new currency in its infancy by buying bitcoins.

[slaveondope]

Also, do the mining pools pay out in bitcoins or in hard currency?

It strikes me as odd that people are gambling on a new currency in its infancy by buying bitcoins.

Investment = Risk

Bitcoin has paid my bills for the last month while Im still unemployed. My farm contains 6x5830's, 8x5850's a lone 5770 and still growing. Thats all Im sayin:D

[STEvil]

So.. the GPU/CPU is computing something when "mining" bitcoins.. what exactly are they computing?

[slaveondope]

So.. the GPU/CPU is computing something when "mining" bitcoins.. what exactly are they computing?

All previous transactions and matching your results to the other nodes.

[CaptMorgan]

So.. the GPU/CPU is computing something when "mining" bitcoins.. what exactly are they computing?

This please

[Serpentarius]

From what i know ... if anyone can print the bills ... or mine the bitcoins .... sooner or later ... the inflation will grow and collapse it, regardless what currency it is.... typical MMORPG currency .... it get inflated very quickly

[slaveondope]

From what i know ... if anyone can print the bills ... or mine the bitcoins .... sooner or later ... the inflation will grow and collapse it, regardless what currency it is.... typical MMORPG currency .... it get inflated very quickly


New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain mathematical problem (i.e. creates a new block), which is difficult to perform and can demonstrate a proof of work. The reward for solving a block is automatically adjusted so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 BTC will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 over years 4-8, 2,625,000 over years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 BTC over time.
In addition, built into the network is a system that attempts to allocate new coins in blocks about every 10 minutes, on average, somewhere on the network. As the number of people who attempt to generate these new coins changes, the difficulty of creating new coins changes. This happens in a manner that is agreed upon by the network as a whole, based upon the time taken to generate the previous 2016 blocks. The difficulty is therefore related to the average computing resources devoted to generate these new coins over the time it took to create these previous blocks. The likelihood of somebody "discovering" one of these blocks is based on the computer they are using compared to all of the computers also generating blocks on the network.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

[CedricFP]

Investment = Risk

Bitcoin has paid my bills for the last month while Im still unemployed. My farm contains 6x5830's, 8x5850's a lone 5770 and still growing. Thats all Im sayin:D

So where are you selling your bitcoins?

Why is there consistent demand as more people start mining with old ATI hardware? EDIT: ^ also see above.

Who is actually buying these?

What about inflation concerns? EDIT ^ ah, I see your post above.

How secure is the code behind the miners?

[slaveondope]

So where are you selling your bitcoins?

Why is there consistent demand as more people start mining with old ATI hardware? EDIT: ^ also see above.

Who is actually buying these?

What about inflation concerns? EDIT ^ ah, I see your post above.

How secure is the code behind the miners?

SHA256 encryption.

edit: other questions not easily answered.:toast2: various reasons. Anonymous exchange is a big reason though and it's also designed opposite of current systems where inflation (new money introduced) is an
issue.

BTC forum (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php)

Exchange (https://mtgox.com)

Dwolla the new Paypal without the bs (https://www.dwolla.com)

[lkiller123]

What do they do with the results that are "mined" through your computers?

How do they generate the profit?

[slaveondope]

What do they do with the results that are "mined" through your computers?

How do they generate the profit?

Your "miners" compare results with others to track all transactions current and previous so no one can double spend or create fake bitcoins. You are not generating profit. Your are providing network security and while you do so you "stumble" upon new coins that are released at the predetermined rate. What gives bitcoins value is just like any other currency the backing of goods, services, and "faith" just like our current fiat currencies.

Worth while to watch.http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773770802849# that's our current system. Bitcoin is near opposite of that.

[mav2000]

How much bandwidth does this use? Does it download and upload a lot?

[slaveondope]

Keeps saying error on connection...not working for me. DO we need to login with a worker name or the login name.

Use worker name and password.

[Red Maw]

Pay Per Share: You get a fixed amount for every share submitted. This method has zero variance but slightly higher fee (because pool takes the risk). Recommended if you like steady payouts.

Proportional: You get a portion of every solved block proportional to your part in pool's hashing power. This payment method has a noticeable variance: some days you can get less, some days you can get more. This is due to randomness of searching for proof-of-work.

For deepbit's payout systems, is the proportional method based off your contribution to the entire pool, or your contribution to a block? Trying to figure out which one will yield the most for a single gpu user like myself.

[slaveondope]

For deepbit's payout systems, is the proportional method based off your contribution to the entire pool, or your contribution to a block? Trying to figure out which one will yield the most for a single gpu user like myself.

Pay per share is based on submissions per block compared to pool @ 3% fee

Proportional is set based on current difficulty http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/ +10% fee
However 3% of fee has been lifted from both due to recent DDOS attacks. I use PPS.

[mav2000]

Hey any idea on the amount of bandwidth used? Is it a lot per day?

[slaveondope]

Hey any idea on the amount of bandwidth used? Is it a lot per day?

It's minimal. just a lot of I/O's

[jcool]

Wow, 2 pages since I went to sleep... let me catch up for a sec will you :D
Edit: Thanks slaveondope for answering most of the questions that were posted, I did not know some of this stuff. You seem to know a lot more about this than me (could have told us eh :p:)

Anyway yes, you have to use the worker login data from deepbit for guiminer, not your registration - sorry about that, will fix it asap.

Edit2: Ok, made some changes, more updates later (details on optimal mining etc)

[slaveondope]

Edit: Thanks slaveondope for answering most of the questions that were posted, I did not know some of this stuff. You seem to know a lot more about this than me (could have told us eh :p:)

Hey I was broke:(, XS has a lot off power:CTF: and that makes the difficulty increase drastically (rate given hardware finds coins) Pay the bills first then help my DC friends out:)

[jcool]

I was thinking, maybe we could start an XS pool or something. Any1 know how to set up a pool? :D
And obviously I don't want the whole of XS to join in on this, but I do want every single cruncher to be able to offset his or her running costs. If people earn a little extra, that's great.
Maybe when you grow a little older, you'll understand where I'm coming from ;)

[slaveondope]

I was thinking, maybe we could start an XS pool or something. Any1 know how to set up a pool? :D

In the rough I do but I lack the network skills atm, though I've learned a lot from this venture. Basically a server running bitcoind such as amazons free servers would work.
A XS pool would be awesome with zero fee's and donation's going towards charities that can help others.

edit: reminds me that I need to get my cpu's setup on WCG again since Ive got the gpu's settled on btc well enough. :sofa:

[[XC] Oj101]

How are payments done? Can someone confirm that they've actually received US currency in their account? With the hardware I can muster to run this I might finally be able to afford to get my business off the ground and can then start adding more rigs to my farm :yepp: Someone wanna sponsor me a 5830? :rofl:

[slaveondope]

Depending on your country withdrawing funds will be different I've done well in my first couple weeks using Mt.Gox and Dwolla.

[zalbard]

Nice write up. :)
Hopefully a few more people can benefit from this. Especially those with idle ATI cards.
The note about GPU cooling is quite serious, by the way. This thing will make your cards run HOT. If you're still on air, do not run your GPU fan on auto. My card runs into 100C that way.

[ggdh]

So one 5870 (OCed) - how much money it can generate? :hehe:

And what's with this difficulty increase over time?

[jbartlett323]

So.. the GPU/CPU is computing something when "mining" bitcoins.. what exactly are they computing?

This was never really answered... according to:

*Snip*
New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain mathematical problem (i.e. creates a new block), which is difficult to perform and can demonstrate a proof of work.

so does that mean it just crunches on random math problems? is it something that can help someone? why do i see the posiiblility of a nefarious interactions here? i mean, i'm all about making money, but i dont want to find out 5 years from now i aided in cracking the US encryption system or something of that nature. So what exactly does it crunch?

[lkiller123]

And what's with this difficulty increase over time?

I guess it's like some sort of economy. It gives out a limited supply of Bitcoins, just like printing money IRL. Your chance of getting coins will eventually decrease with more people mining them.

[artemm]

This was never really answered... according to:


so does that mean it just crunches on random math problems? is it something that can help someone? why do i see the posiiblility of a nefarious interactions here? i mean, i'm all about making money, but i dont want to find out 5 years from now i aided in cracking the US encryption system or something of that nature. So what exactly does it crunch?

This is my concern as well and I haven't really seen a clear answer anywhere so far. Once the computation is complete, is only a hash check conducted or is the "math problem" really a WU that is uploaded to an unknown destination? Seems fishy... I may give it a shot, but it's still fishy :p:

[rcofell]

This is my concern as well and I haven't really seen a clear answer anywhere so far. Once the computation is complete, is only a hash check conducted or is the "math problem" really a WU that is uploaded to an unknown destination? Seems fishy... I may give it a shot, but it's still fishy :p:
The details of the "math problem" is easily available, all the code (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) is open-source. Basically it's doing a large amount of SHA256 computations, which is somewhat explained under the technical section here (http://www.weusecoins.com/mining-guide.php). More details are thrown around on the mining page (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Mining) of the wiki.

I'm planning on getting around to digging into the mining code today, lets see how that goes :)

I'll have to see what all goes into making a pool too, if it would be worth it or not...

[Bobsama]

My concern with this is the small number of bitcoins that will be in existence; there's literally not enough bitcoins for even a small population.

Anyways, I'm trying this regardless. The GUIMiner is stuck on "connecting"; does anyone know a fix?

[rcofell]

That's where the deflation would come into play; if bitcoins were to stick around that far into the future, then we would likely be trading in fractional amounts.

[1200W]

Just got mine up and running :) Lets see how it goes :wasntme:

[[XC] Oj101]

So... A single 5870 can generate about $330 per month, if I run ten I can be looking at $3300 per month? Electricity for that will come to about $400 per month, and the initial outlay $3000. That sounds too good to be true?

[zalbard]

Oj101;4868082']So... A single 5870 can generate about $330 per month
Where did you get these numbers? O.o
It's way too high, lol.
More like $150, maybe $200 tops, and that's without electricity cost.

[[XC] flat-four]

Would there be any point to running a 5450 on this? I have a 6850 as my primary, but would it be worth while to throw the 5450 in my system only for bitcoin?

[[XC] Oj101]

Well from what I've seen 1 Mhash/s equals about $1/month, and the 5870 does 313 Mhash/s. Lets say $150 per month (electricity doesn't matter) - that's still $1500 per month for doing nothing?

[[XC] Oj101]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

A 5450 will earn you a tenner per month or so, it's better than nothing eh?

[RADCOM]

will it run on a quadro FX/1500 or 1700 and at what sort of rate? maybe I'll just plug the 6990 in< rubs hands together> I'm thinking this could be an additional hardware revenue stream :)

[jcool]

Oj101;4868082']So... A single 5870 can generate about $330 per month, if I run ten I can be looking at $3300 per month? Electricity for that will come to about $400 per month, and the initial outlay $3000. That sounds too good to be true?

That's what I thought... but it seems to actually work that way, yeah.
Also, overclocked GPUs can hash a lot faster than this, especially if you have water cooling. For example, my 5870's hash at 430Mhash/s each @ 1Ghz core. I even pushed an HD5850 over the 400Mhash barrier running 1075Mhz core :cool:

This only works on VERY good cooling, and with the good old V1 original layout design (digital volterra PWM --> voltage adjustable).

Oh yeah, forgot to mention...

Anyone who is making money off this HowTo and NOT crunching for WCG will get a call from Movieman!

:hrhr:

[1200W]

Anyone who is making money off this HowTo and NOT crunching for WCG will get a call from Movieman!

:hrhr:

WHERES the STOP button???? quick...




:rofl:

[[XC] Oj101]

So is thinking of investing in this to get my company off the ground to afford to work for myself and get a few SR-2s acceptable? :hrhr:

[zalbard]

Oj101;4868097']Lets say $150 per month (electricity doesn't matter) - that's still $1500 for 10 per month for doing nothing?
Yep, pretty much. I'd jump on this while it's available.
Technically, it also requires an investment in hardware, and potentially upgrades (since you will be earning less once you get slower compared to others), but I think it's still pretty damn good.

[shoota]

Will this all work on linux?

I can get two 5770's for $130, is that worth it?

[dairyFarmer]

So if you follow the $$ how does this work?

Someone is sending us distributed computing packets?? for an unknown project?? and then paying the cruncher in virtual currency? :shrug:

[skeyo]

This sounds to me like selling snow to Eskimos.

[Petra]

Okay, you guys got me interested so I started doing some research.... this 44 page document on the legality of Bitcoin was a rather interesting read and I suggest that some of you take a look at it (just hit the one-click download link near the upper portion of the page and, if you aren't comfortable with that, I have the PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1817857

After reading that, as well as a bunch of other stuff this afternoon, I've decided that the Bitcoin mining thing isn't for me (mostly due to legal grey areas and how that could possibly have a negative impact given our household profession).

Perhaps they should ditch RSA for AES... I'd be a little more comfortable with that. ;)

[p2501]

Is there any extrapolation possible on how far into the future mining will be possible?!

If you buy two complete 4x5870 miners that cost maybe thousand € each then at the current rates (1600mhashes/s x2 equals 1693€) and my current energy cost (.19cent, 2kw load equals 1440kwh/month or 274€ in utilities/month) you'd need at least two months to offset initial costs.

[mav2000]

Just started on bitcoin, lets see how it goes.

[Gamekiller]

I don't even own a single ATI card. :( Would be nice to do nothing and generate cash..

[don_xvi]

After reading that, as well as a bunch of other stuff this afternoon, I've decided that the Bitcoin mining thing isn't for me (mostly due to legal grey areas and how that could possibly have a negative impact given our household profession).

Perhaps they should ditch RSA for AES... I'd be a little more comfortable with that. ;)

Could you elaborate?

[[XC] flat-four]

I don't think I'd worry too much about legal ramifications as of yet. The author himself is seeking/allowing donations in his introduction. I would think as the author is just finishing up his law degree at Yale, I doubt he would jeopardize his becoming a lawyer if he thought there could be problems.

[jcool]

I just ordered 9 5870's and 2 5850's - German market is pretty much empty now except for a few overpriced old cards :D
Prices are going up every day BTW. I just sold 5 BCT today for 11€ each, whereas yesterday I only got 8€ per BCT.

Join while it's still going, and put the money to good use (cruncher hardware/utility bill etc) :)

[Bobsama]

So if you follow the $$ how does this work?

Someone is sending us distributed computing packets?? for an unknown project?? and then paying the cruncher in virtual currency? :shrug:

If you follow the money, you will find that someone created a limited number of tokens for use in virtual trades. Since there's a limited number, there's now a limited supply. The real money in this is in the bitcoin currency brokers; they keep the spread (which can be a few centers per bitcoin) when people buy bitcoins with more established currency.

The thing to realize is that these currency traders will ALWAYS make money; traditional currency will inflate while this currency never will. That means that the bitcoins they bought yesterday and sold today will have appreciated in value.

Can anyone help me get a connection? I'm stuck at that point. Maybe it's a firewall somewhere blocking it; it's not my network.

[Alpha]

hmmm.... i have some horsepower here at work. i may give this a try. nothing like banking off free electricity eh?

maybe i can get my wife to let me buy some stuff at home if it pays for itself in a month or two...

will post up my endeavors eventually.

[jcool]

Can anyone help me get a connection? I'm stuck at that point. Maybe it's a firewall somewhere blocking it; it's not my network.

Can you post a screenshot?
Also, are you mining solo? That didn't work for me, try joining a pool.

[Musho]

Trying to get my two 5870s to work, but when I run the miner program it complains that it didn't detect any openCL devices. So I tried another version (2.2), which seems to work. How much extra performance will I get by using 2.1 instead of 2.2? And why isn't 2.1 working for me? Thanks! :up:

[jcool]

TBH I had the same problem with most rigs. I'm running on 2.1 only on my main machine with dual 5870's, here's what I did (may or may not help you):
- I had Cat. 11.3 with APP already installed when I found out about bitcoin, so I went to control panel --> software and fired up the ati uninstaller. Selected manual, and only unchecked the APP SDK version 2.45xxx, rebooted
- then I installed the 2.1 SDK and it worked
Simply installing the catalyst w/o APP and the 2.1 SDK caused the same error for me on a freshly installed rig, for whatever reason.

[artemm]

my 5970 is getting 1Mhash/s per core. I installed 11.4 with 2.1 SDK. Kinda had a feeling it wouldn't just fire up :p:

[jcool]

Yes, the 2.1 SDK isn't for everyone. In fact I now believe it rarely works correctly... you lose about 5% on the 2.4 so I recommend staying with that if you have problems or don't want to mess with things.
Just download the latest 11.5 cat, install, and run. Easy :)

1st post updated with some performance tipps and a new, completely free mining pool

[zalbard]

Just use the latest SDK, it's really not THAT much of a difference...

By the way, I am trying btcguild.com. No fees is nice, but I am getting "Connection problems" every few seconds on both of my miners, so I think that will reduce the mining performance.

Also, I'm not sure, but do I need one worker per one device? What are they for?

[Bobsama]

Can you post a screenshot?
Also, are you mining solo? That didn't work for me, try joining a pool.

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2624/unledyol.png
HD5850 on the Q8300 @ 3.0 system. I'll overclock this rig a bit higher later.

[Tom128]

I just ordered 9 5870's and 2 5850's

:eek: Wow! I don't have the guts to do that.

I am very tempted to buy a handful of 58XX cards as well, I have the PCIe slots to run 10 total. I am just worried that as soon as I do that, the bitcoin bubble will then burst.

At the very least I am going to put my 5850 back on water cooling and OC it up.

[jcool]

Yeah well... no risk, no fun :cool:
Bobsama, I have no idea what could be causing this other than your router or software firewall.

Maybe try a different pool? The BTC guild is better anyway cause it's completely free, I just edited my 1st post.

[ggdh]

Bobsama, I had the same problem. Gui miner was trying to connect and after 10 minutes of waiting i figured out there's something wrong :hitself:
I uninstalled 11.5 drivers, replaced with 10.5 and manually installed SDK 2.1 from jcool's link :up:

[ggdh]

And btw, i'm getting 410Mhash/s with 5870@940. Is it about right? Power usage is ~235W with 2600K with power saving on (1600MHz).
In 24 hours it did ~0.8 coin...

[zalbard]

Also, I'm not sure, but do I need one worker per one device? What are they for?
OK, found that out:

You will need to create a unique username and password for each mining client (worker). Example: If you wish to generate coins with 2 videocards and a good CPU you will need 3 worker accounts. One for each device.
...

And btw, i'm getting 410Mhash/s with 5870@940. Is it about right?
Yep.

In 24 hours it did ~0.8 coin...
Around $8, then. :)

[jcool]

OK, found that out:
You will need to create a unique username and password for each mining client (worker). Example: If you wish to generate coins with 2 videocards and a good CPU you will need 3 worker accounts. One for each device.

Thats BS from what I can tell.
I'm running 8 cards on the same pool worker, no problems at all. Neither on the deepbit nor the BCT Guild pool.

[zalbard]

It does work either way. Hence why I was unsure. Could it be possible to get more Bitcoins this way, though? I mean, why would anyone need more than one worker in the first place, then? Or is that one per PC?

[Tom128]

I have my 5850 setup (did it on my lunch break lol). It's only getting around 210Mhash/s which seems low. Ah well. I have it on air still so I put the fan at 45%, hopefully that is enough.

I think once I get my first coin and see it turn into money I will probably drool and buy more video cards than I should lol.

I am still a bit confused on the wallet concept. It seems so...fragile almost. And if I want to use two different computers that means I have to have bitcoin running on both, which will result in two wallets? If I want to consolidate my coins would I sent coins to myself to one of the two machines? Or perhaps make a "savings account" wallet on one of them and put all coins from all machines in there? And do I have to be on that machine to use the coins?

I am mostly thinking out loud, i will be reading through all the wiki stuff and hopefully answer myself.

[Red Maw]

My poor gpu needs better cooling....hope this pays for a new before it dies :rofl:

Probably going to stop until I can get it WC, more for the noise than anything else.

[Petra]

Could you elaborate?

Defense contractor work... and AES has no known backdoor.


flat-four;4868865']I don't think I'd worry too much about legal ramifications as of yet. The author himself is seeking/allowing donations in his introduction. I would think as the author is just finishing up his law degree at Yale, I doubt he would jeopardize his becoming a lawyer if he thought there could be problems.

While I am inclined to agree that there isn't much to worry about currently since Bitcoin is still small and, therefore, of little interest to authorities... there is tremendous potential for things such as this to become a target of the government (as several of the arguments in that paper cover, as well as many issues which were beyond the scope of the paper). As for jeopardizing a career as a lawyer, when was the last time you heard of a lawyer being disbarred as a result of illegal activity that either wasn't particularly heinous or not directly related to the job?

[Sparky]

All I have is a 4870 and according to the wiki it sucks for this lol. Not even going to bother trying.

[Tom128]

All I have is a 4870 and according to the wiki it sucks for this lol. Not even going to bother trying.

Definitely not as powerful as the 5/6000's but it's still going to give about $90/month payout minus it's electricity cost.

[artemm]

This has bubble written all over it.. but if I manage to get this working and successfully cash out on the 5970s output, I may use this to justify a 2600K cruncher.. :D

[OldChap]

Based on the $8 a day and the cheapest 5870 I can buy new (with warranty), the card pays for itself in 1 month, and for the electric 2 days later, after that this is just $$ for us crunchers with spare slots .... even those with small psu's can probably run 1 per rig. What's more, even at a lower amount, to be making after 3 months would still be a good producer of funds for new crunchers.

It is the beginning of the month too....mmmm tempting. and it was so quiet since the air rigs were turned off too :shakes:

Any guesstimations on when the bottom drops out?

Something of a fillip for ati methinks.

[zalbard]

There is one small issue with this and crunching, though. In some cases each ATI GPU eats up to 25% of CPU resources. It's a bug and does not happen in each case (should be 0-1% if everything's well). So best check for that before running both WCG and BC. This is usually a driver & APP issue.

[OldChap]

There is one small issue with this and crunching, though. In some cases each ATI GPU eats up to 25% of CPU resources. It's a bug and does not happen in each case (should be 0-1% if everything's well). So best check for that before running both WCG and BC. This is usually a driver & APP issue.

If I could reasonably expect to fund a new cruncher from this it would be worth it in my view. With a new 2600K on WCG I could retire the core2's, drop the clocks, and just run BC on those, then, from the next tranche, fund more.

[MadHacker]

Question i have is what would be the best single slot videocard to use?

[Splave]

6990 is best performer but costs the most
I believe 58** are cost/performance kings

[Sparky]

Definitely not as powerful as the 5/6000's but it's still going to give about $90/month payout minus it's electricity cost.

Whoa... really? :idea:

[artemm]

Definitely not as powerful as the 5/6000's but it's still going to give about $90/month payout minus it's electricity cost.

LOL, that's sparky's total electrical for the month :rofl:

[Tom128]

Whoa... really? :idea:

Close enough anyways. If you look at the performance of a 4870:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

...and guess 90Mhash/sec and plug that into the calculator:
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

....you get

per Day - $2.81
per Week - $20.49
per Month - $85.43

Should at least cover some electricity bills! If I jump into this, and it works, I will use it to convert my Phenom II's to either Bulldozers if they seem good, or Sandy's.

[KaptainBlaZzed]

have been mining BTC for about 6 days now with my 5870 and have 5.5 BTC.
The core of my 5870 is OC'd to 940 and i am getting 400 M/hs per second.

At the current market rate of $13.70 they are worth $75. Right now a 5870 produces about $12.50 a day.

The difficulty is going to increase by about 25% and i believe this is going to happen around monday.

Real Time Bitcoin Stats
http://blockexplorer.com/q

Bitcoin Mining Calculator
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

[zalbard]

The difficulty is going to increase by about 25% and i believe this is going to happen around monday.
How does difficulty affect income, though? Less Bitcoins per day but they are worth more?

[KaptainBlaZzed]

How does difficulty affect income, though? Less Bitcoins per day but they are worth more?

That is the general idea but, we will have to wait and see if they are actually worth more after the difficulty increase.

[artemm]

How does difficulty affect income, though? Less Bitcoins per day but they are worth more?

Takes longer to get them.

Deepbit which is largest pool currently, IIRC more than doubled its output since May 17th (went from 800Gh/s to 1800 currently.) Since the max number of coins is capped, the more power that's thrown at mining, the harder it is to mine.

It's crazy, I think the stock of 5-series cards is almost exhausted and 5970s are going for as much as $700 on eBay when only a few months ago, I bought one for $350 WITH a water block. On regional CLs and forum B/S/T sections there are more WTB threads than FS threads. People are really taking this stuff seriously.

[kjeldoran]

I just tossed my 5770 onto Bitcoin. Based on that calculator it should generate ~$150 a month. Seems like a good investment since my fiance wasn't using it lol. The extra money I make is going to go for more WCG hardware. It might go to another 5 or 6 series amd video card IF mining remains profitable.

[jcool]

I just tossed my 5770 onto Bitcoin. Based on that calculator it should generate ~$150 a month. Seems like a good investment since my fiance wasn't using it lol. The extra money I make is going to go for more WCG hardware. It might go to another 5 or 6 series amd video card IF mining remains profitable.

:up:
Now this is exactly why I decided to share the knowledge I gained here on XS WCG. Crunch on people :cool:

[Tom128]

I would like to contribute a +1 to the statement that SDK 2.1 is better for a 5800GPU. I wasn't even paying attention to what I downloaded and had 2.4. I was getting 220-250Mhash/s. I downgraded to the 2.1 SDK and am getting 240-280.

[kjeldoran]

:up:
Now this is exactly why I decided to share the knowledge I gained here on XS WCG. Crunch on people :cool:

I heard about bitcoin prior to your OP, but there wasn't a decent guide to setting it up.

I guess I am more torn on what is the better investment in the long run.
1. If I invest into more WCG hardware I get more results done for WCG.
2. If I invest into a used 5870 I can generate an extra $250 a month. That makes it an extra $400 a month which means 1 2600k chip and part of a motherboard/ram/cooler/psu. I might just invest into another video card initially since it would allow more WCG hardware later on.

I did toss my gtx560 on bitcoin, but nvidia sucks at bitcoin. I took it off since it really wasn't worth running. Makes me wish I went with a 6950.

[p2501]

Takes longer to get them.

If it takes longer to find them but they will be worth more after the difficulty increase, shouldn't then <ideally> the payout stay the same?

Did anyone watch this thing longer than a few days? How often are these increases to be excpeted?! :shrug:

Kinda tempted to pull the trigger on two quad 5870 rigs here.... BUT for that the payout would need to be stable for 2 months to offset initial building costs. :rolleyes:

[MadHacker]

6990 is best performer but costs the most
I believe 58** are cost/performance kings

what i meant to say is what is the best bang for buck.
i believe until the 6990 comes down in price, its way past its point of diminishing returns.

also looking at it on newegg, they only had 2, 1 was double slot, other was watercooled, single slot. (but out of stock and out of my reasonable price range)

[rcofell]

How does difficulty affect income, though? Less Bitcoins per day but they are worth more?
More difficulty = less probability for the ENTIRE network generating the next block. This is because on average the whole cloud will require more hashes in order to find an accepted solution per block.

It is one of the mechanisms used to slow down bitcoin generation according to the "schedule". The other is sometime in the future (~2012) only 25bitcoins will be "mined" per block, then 12.5 later on, etc.


If it takes longer to find them but they will be worth more after the difficulty increase, shouldn't then <ideally> the payout stay the same?

Did anyone watch this thing longer than a few days? How often are these increases to be excpeted?! :shrug:

Kinda tempted to pull the trigger on two quad 5870 rigs here.... BUT for that the payout would need to be stable for 2 months to offset initial building costs. :rolleyes:
Think of difficulty as decreasing how often a new chunk of coins is found, leading to you to get less coins found on average over time. This is in ADDITION to more miners diluting your share of the chunk as well. Although difficulty is directly correlated to more miners too.

No one knows for certain how often these increases will be, since it's DIRECTLY affected by how much compute power is out there mining. More miners = more difficulty + less share for you.

I believe the new difficulty is calculated every 2016 blocks, at which time the entire network adjusts it in attempts to make the next 2016 blocks take two weeks of real world time to generate.

[Alpha]

got it up and running on my wife's rig. she has a GTX460, and soon will house 2 9800GT's. Until i get some money from this, i have to work with what i have. she may actually go for me getting some 6870's, lol.

[jcool]

Just a heads-up, the BCT Guild pool has been having some issues today. I recommend staying with another pool for at least another day or so.

[Sparky]

I'll wait to try this until I get my water loop back online. Which should be soon, as I finally found a way to clean everything so all that's left is radiator flushing, which should happen this weekend :yepp:

[p2501]

More difficulty = less probability for the ENTIRE network generating the next block. This is because on average the whole cloud will require more hashes in order to find an accepted solution per block.

It is one of the mechanisms used to slow down bitcoin generation according to the "schedule". The other is sometime in the future (~2012) only 25bitcoins will be "mined" per block, then 12.5 later on, etc.


Think of difficulty as decreasing how often a new chunk of coins is found, leading to you to get less coins found on average over time. This is in ADDITION to more miners diluting your share of the chunk as well. Although difficulty is directly correlated to more miners too.

No one knows for certain how often these increases will be, since it's DIRECTLY affected by how much compute power is out there mining. More miners = more difficulty + less share for you.

I believe the new difficulty is calculated every 2016 blocks, at which time the entire network adjusts it in attempts to make the next 2016 blocks take two weeks of real world time to generate.


Sounds like it only makes sense to throw in everything you have _now_. Also one would be getting less and less every 2016 blocks which leads me to the question of how far down earnings will go? Watching these (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) graphs isn't very reassuring..

[artemm]

Whelp... looks like BOINC and Guiminer don't like each other. When both are on, my performance in Guiminer fluctuates wildly (sometimes it 2Mh/s and sometimes it's 600Mh/s.) However, when BOINC is snoozed (:eek:) my Hemlocks get a constant 370Mh/s each @ 840 on the core.

I suppose it might have something to do with the CPU usage glitch, but it's pretty clear that these two projects won't play nice together on my machine.

[rcofell]

Which SDK version are you using?

For now you could just tell BOINC to spare a core or two and see if that helps.

[artemm]

Which SDK version are you using?

For now you could just tell BOINC to spare a core or two and see if that helps.

2.1

Taking down two cores allows full GUIminer performance. 1 core down bottlenecks second GPU by 40 MH/s

Edit: not cores, threads... out of 12

[Reflex1]

Im having problems with my Bitcoin core app (the wallet). It doesn't start up anymore and comes up with the error: Couldn't load blkindex.dat
ive tried re-installing multiple times and same problem. any ideas?
EDIT: nevermind i fixed it by opening a new wallet :)

[Red Maw]

Just a heads-up, the BCT Guild pool has been having some issues today. I recommend staying with another pool for at least another day or so.

What kind of problems? I've been using it all day and haven't noticed anything odd, not that I know what normal is either though.

[zalbard]

What kind of problems? I've been using it all day and haven't noticed anything odd, not that I know what normal is either though.
Connection problems, I mentioned them earlier.

[ggdh]

And how to sell coins? :hehe:

On deepbit site i had 1.15, i hit "instant payout", it appeared in my bitcoin wallet as received. I already have an account on bitmarket.eu, but my balance did not change and is still zero. What am i doing wrong?

[[XC] Oj101]

I'm just getting "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC" , do I need to enable port forwarding? I have disabled the firewall already.

[[XC] Oj101]

I tried this, but still nothing:

Service select User Defined
Protocol TCP
Public Start Port 8333
Public End Port 8333
Mapped Private IP Address 192.168.1.100
Mapped Private Port (Leave blank or input 0 indicating Virtual Server Service.) 8333

[shoota]

OJ I had that problem too. For me it was because I had my account name entered instead of my worker name

[[XC] Oj101]

^$#% YEAH! Thanks mate :D

[mreuter80]

A totally different question(s): What about taxes?
I would assume it's different for each country, and maybe not relevant as long as you only mine the virtual money. But what happens when you change it to real money? Who needs/must take care of it? Is it the miner? Does the pool takes care of it? What type of taxes can we expect and what is the percentage? Can we offset the involved costs (energy/hardware)?
Any thoughts?

[Tom128]

A totally different question(s): What about taxes?

I read somewhere on their wiki that you are expected to report earnings from mining just like you are expected to report any other income like tips, freelance work, gifts, etc.

[Sparky]

I read somewhere on their wiki that you are expected to report earnings from mining just like you are expected to report any other income like tips, freelance work, gifts, etc.

I can see reporting earnings, freelance work, and tips, as that is all job related. This too. But gifts? Heck no.

[shoota]

Oj101;4869976']^$#% YEAH! Thanks mate :D

Sweet!


Re taxes: I can almost assure you this falls under income and would news to be reported. how? No idea, but I could ask my CPA father-in-law.

[[XC] Oj101]

Please do, I don't know if you could consider this a salary?

[stangracin3]

how long did it take to connect to the pool?
mines been connecting for 5 minutes...


edit:

figured it out. running between 345 and 350

[ggdh]

I repeat my question: what to do if i have bitocins in "bitcoin" wallet (software, not webpage)? I had 1 bitcoin on my deepbit account and then I transferred it to my wallet using my wallet's address.

What now? If i log in into bitmarket my balance is zero.

[Otis11]

I think I'm gonna give this a try for a bit... anyone want to tell me which the best card from here (http://www.frys.com/search?to=24&cat=-64398&sort=price%20desc&from=0&query_string=&pType=pDisplay&rows=25&resultpage=0&start=0&rows=25) would be?

If I can get this set up today, I'll swing by and grab one tonight... Wanted another cruncher. :D

Edit: here's what it's giving me... anyone know what's wrong?
(Wrong log in or password - but I'm sure they are both correct...)

http://i51.tinypic.com/2wgyd0p.png

The 260 is just a proof of concept before I get the other card tonight.

[artemm]

Otis, make sure to go into your account at deepbit and set the same password on the worker. Just click your email and type your password. What annoys me about that is it doesn't block out the characters, so people can look over your shoulder, so don't use your normal password.

EDIT: you're in the DFW area right? There's one Diamond 5870 for only $220 at the Irving location. GO GO GO!

[artemm]

I repeat my question: what to do if i have bitocins in "bitcoin" wallet (software, not webpage)? I had 1 bitcoin on my deepbit account and then I transferred it to my wallet using my wallet's address.

What now? If i log in into bitmarket my balance is zero.

You have to fund your trading account, trade for currency, then withdraw from that account. I exchanged my first bitcoin this morning @ 17 USD. Pretty wild considering this only took one night for my mainrig to pull off.

[Otis11]

Otis, make sure to go into your account at deepbit and set the same password on the worker. Just click your email and type your password. What annoys me about that is it doesn't block out the characters, so people can look over your shoulder, so don't use your normal password.

EDIT: you're in the DFW area right? There's one Diamond 5870 for only $220 at that location. GO GO GO!

During the summer I live in LA... so it's the location out here.

And I think I didn't set up the worker correctly on deepbit... what's "Worker login's tail (up to 5 characters)"

Also I'm guessing proportional is recommended setting?

What about failure detection threshold?

Sorry... my brain's not working this morning. :shakes:

Edit: also, which brand of GFX is recommended for ATI? Aka has good heat dissipation and warranty? I know nothing about them...

[artemm]

During the summer I live in LA... so it's the location out here.

And I think I didn't set up the worker correctly on deepbit... what's "Worker login's tail (up to 5 characters)"

Also I'm guessing proportional is recommended setting?

What about failure detection threshold?

Sorry... my brain's not working this morning. :shakes:

Edit: also, which brand of GFX is recommended for ATI? Aka has good heat dissipation and warranty? I know nothing about them...

Password is all I needed to configure. As for brand, I think for the 5-series cards, you should just grab whatever you can get. The price of 5970s has literally doubled on eBay (I've been watching.) All of the brands are good, although some have better warranties and quicker RMA. XFX apparently is one of the best while HIS has had problems. Asus deviates from reference design, but their RMA is good. I've had good luck with Gigabyte too.

Look for new 5870 or 5850 and used 5970 (if you get lucky.) At $220, though, I'd grab that Diamond card in a flash.

[Otis11]

So I just set the password on my worker to the same as i enter on guiMinner?

Edit: that doesn't appear to be working either...

[[XC] gomeler]

Just bought a pair of watercooled HD5850s. I guess I'll set them up in a 2600K and get the CPU crunching WCG. I've been dillydallying about bitcoin for a while but I might as well play with it now :D

[Fhqwhgads6680]

I don't understand what is encouraging buyers to buy these? Its not like they are backed by gold or anything like that so the only thing that makes them valuable is relative rarity which, like collectables for example, doesn't mean anything.... once people loose interest and stop buying they become useless right? And as others have said it is a little worry-some what they are doing with the computational power... but I'd probably try it if I had an ati video card, switched to nvidia purely for gpugrid... :( I also couldn't sell this to my wife thats for sure...

[Otis11]

Tried BTCGuild but no luck still... Any ideas?

[mreuter80]

I found this interesting episode about bitcoin on youtube. Although a lot is still unclear, it might help answer a couple of questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwNfBgwbqng

I keep thinking about all the miners during the California Gold Rush time. Maybe generating the coins is not the way to go ... :shrug:

[Fhqwhgads6680]

Trying this on my GTX285's acutally... thats $120 per month or so... if it works then I can sell the wife on it :)

[Deux]

Been at this for about two months, not sure how I feel about its long term stability.

Currently doing 2.9 Ghash/sec with 2x5970 and 2x 5870 mining at BTCmine

[Reflex1]

I've got my 2x 480GTX's on it, nVidia really sucks with this. They produce 200Mhash/s together! :( its been on BTCGuild all day and no coins yet ...any ideas?

[Fhqwhgads6680]

Hey guys, quick question to those who have done this. How does the trading work? how do you get paid for the bitcoin? Paypal or something? I am just curious how the process works once you have bitcoins

Reflex, I feel your pain... I Just set up my 2 GTX 285's and they get about 60mhash/s a piece....

[Deux]

So basically once you have bitcoins in the wallet on your pc you can sell them on an exchange such as mtgox. After that you can withdraw your money several ways, the easiest way for US users being dwolla.

[zalbard]

Been at this for about two months, not sure how I feel about its long term stability.

Currently doing 2.9 Ghash/sec with 2x5970 and 2x 5870 mining at BTCmine
Did your income ($) per Mhash/sec go down during this time? And if so, by how much? Any idea?

[ggdh]

First transaction: 14.2 euro = 20$ :hehe:

Started looking for 5850...

[Otis11]

how long did it take to connect to the pool?
mines been connecting for 5 minutes...


edit:

figured it out. running between 345 and 350

How did you fix your connection issues? Mine still just says connecting... :shrug:

[p2501]

Did your income ($) per Mhash/sec go down during this time? And if so, by how much? Any idea?

I'd be very interested in this too. :yepp:

Edit: Also, did you have kind of a more or less constant income? Meaning, did you manage to sell all bitcoins you wanted to?

[Otis11]

How did you fix your connection issues? Mine still just says connecting... :shrug:

Got it... now to wait for results. Not quite sure I did it right, and not sure what I did, but the GPUs are showing load. :shrug:

Edit: Every time I start it on my GTX260 my computer freezes... Time to go pick up a 58xx and see if that does any better.
(anyone else notice their computer freeze?)

[stangracin3]

Got it... now to wait for results. Not quite sure I did it right, and not sure what I did, but the GPUs are showing load. :shrug:

Edit: Every time I start it on my GTX260 my computer freezes... Time to go pick up a 58xx and see if that does any better.
(anyone else notice their computer freeze?)

same here lol


and yes the freezing is annoying

[SMTB1963]

A totally different question(s): What about taxes?
I would assume it's different for each country, and maybe not relevant as long as you only mine the virtual money. But what happens when you change it to real money? Who needs/must take care of it? Is it the miner? Does the pool takes care of it? What type of taxes can we expect and what is the percentage? Can we offset the involved costs (energy/hardware)?
Any thoughts?

A very astute question indeed. While the mere act of mining bitcoins probably has no tax effect for the miner, purchasing anything with them (or "exchanging" them for hard currency) most certainly creates a tax liability - at least as far as the US IRS is concerned.

Virtual currencies do have some advantages over "real" currencies, but bitcoin has some built-in weaknesses that IMO make it's economic utility questionable. In particular, the arbitrary 21M cap automatically makes the entire system deflationary over the long run (unless I'm missing something).

As far as the here & now, I've looked at a few of the exchange sites and what you see is a huge run-up in bitcoin value over the past couple of months in terms of virtually all currencies bitcoins can convert to. As someone else has pointed out in this thread, the "market" for bitcoins looks to be in a classic speculative bubble.

Mine all you want, but be prepared for tax consequences if you actually trade with these things. And I sure as hell wouldn't be going long in bitcoins at their current prices, given that I see no market fundamentals supporting the current pricing levels.

Not trying to rain on the parade, I just think everybody should have their eyes wide open before diving into bitcoin. :)

[jcool]

Updated Post #1 with a few of the most common questions & problems.
But people, really - I am trying here. Many of the questions posed on the last few pages can easily be answered by carefully reading through the 1st post and/or some quick web research.

Edit: No freezing issues here, not even a GUI slowdown like I got with virtually any GPU crunching project. ATIs are definitely the way to go on this.

SMTB1963, I understand your concerns. I'm not quite sold this will work for very long either. All I know is that RIGHT NOW, it does generate some instant money if you already have the right hardware.
It's (probably) also gonna earn you something if you have to go out and buy just the card. I never advised anyone to go all-out and build entirely new rigs for this. That is entirely up to the individual cruncher and his/her policy on risks vs. chances.

[Otis11]

Sorry for all the questions Jcool...Thanks for putting this all together!

[jcool]

Sorry for all the questions Jcool...Thanks for putting this all together!

No problem mate - just saying, I can't respond to everyone individually at the rate questions are coming up.
Looking at your bitcoin screenshot, it needs to connect to all blocks before it works correctly. It took about 10 minutes for me after the first start-up until all blocks were connected.
As for the login problem, I have no idea - "auth token rejected by server" is something I havent seen yet. Try another pool, the BCT guild pool is better anyway 'cause it's free :)

[Deux]

Did your income ($) per Mhash/sec go down during this time? And if so, by how much? Any idea?

So far, it's has actually increased. Keep in mind though, that's not really the expected behavior over time. Since I started mining, difficulty had risen ~5x while price has risen almost 20x so right now it is actually significantly more profitable than when I started.

[CaptMorgan]

Another jcool thread going hog wild:ROTF: but still great stuff but I had to go and catch up:D . I apologize if this was answered but I do know it was asked but what are the wu's and what are they for? I am just curious as others and it is too bad WCG could not compensate crunchers in this fashion as others beyond us good hearted folks would most certainly join!

[kjeldoran]

I switched to BTC Guild from deepbit and it seems I am ahead with more BTC than compared to deepbit, even with a 2.5% donation.

I do have some GUI lag *depending* on work load. If my GTX560 runs near 100% my system is pretty much unusable. I am not sure why it is like this, but maybe something with WCG, but I'm not killing a core of WCG on my sandy CPU lol. My fiance's system does have a bit of lag, but it isn't too bad and she hasn't complained. She did complain about the increase in noise from the stock fan so I set it to 50% manually and temps are about 2C higher. Since we use these rigs daily, we average about 210Mhashes.

Seems prices are going up to, based on the 210Mhashes I am now generating about $250 a month...enough to fund a 5870.

[rcofell]

Another jcool thread going hog wild:ROTF: but still great stuff but I had to go and catch up:D . I apologize if this was answered but I do know it was asked but what are the wu's and what are they for? I am just curious as others and it is too bad WCG could not compensate crunchers in this fashion as others beyond us good hearted folks would most certainly join!
They're not "WUs" in the classical sense. Instead, they're basically a cryptographic way of packaging the records of all recent bitcoin transactions since the last block, making it secure through a bunch of probability theory, etc.

Basically what mining is doing is taking the list of transactions (actually a compressed form of it), adding in a few addition pieces of information (last block ID, timestamp, client version, client computing it, difficulty, etc.), plus a random number (called a nonce). As a whole, all of this information is SHA256 hashed twice with the goal of achieving an output value composed of 00000000XXXXXXXXXX... where the number of zeroes required are determined by the difficulty and the Xs are left to whatever value they may be. The input's nonce is incremented until the output happens to match such an acceptable value.

Once the hash's output reaches the accepted goal, it's sent to the whole network as the official next block, where it's used as a header to the log of transactions going with it. Just to note, there's additional confirmation that continues for the next so many blocks to make sure something underhanded didn't happen, like someone generated a bunch of blocks targeting a really easy difficulty or something.

What mining is all about is: the first person who generates one of these valid solutions first gets a pre-determined "prize", which right now is 50BTC. However, view it as whoever is "lucky" enough to generate a valid solution first, since the transaction log is continuously changing and hashing is a one-way function. This means that no matter how long you've been trying things, it's basically brute-forcing, you don't know how much longer there is to go.

Lemme know if this is too wordy of an attempt at explanation :)

[snoro]

actually thats perfect and it should be added in jcool's original post so we dont have 1 person each page asking what are the "wu". Did settled it up on my hd5770 rig ( i5-760 crunching also on wcg but brother daily rig so he sometime shut it off the damm :banana:) and my hd5670 rig (i3-530 that i got from whitefiredragon a while ago [thanks again mate] dedicated wcg cruncher) for a nice 210-250 mhash/sec output. Will help pay the bill that a university student can have( starting next september in litterature here in quebec) and maybe add another cruncher with a hd5870 or hd6970

[lkiller123]

So Nvidia cards can't participate in this? :(

[[XC] gomeler]

I think I bought all the available HD 5850s I could see :D Man, next week is going to be hilarious. Sure hope the GPU mining profitability maintains or grows in the next 2 months.

[rcofell]

So Nvidia cards can't participate in this? :(
They can, however they're nowhere near as productive/efficient as ATI cards (~1/3 of equivalent ATI cards).

[kjeldoran]

They can, however they're nowhere near as productive/efficient as ATI cards (~1/3 of equivalent ATI cards).

QFT. My gtx 560ti gets around 68Mhashes when running maxed and my radeon 5770 gets 180Mhashes when maxed.

I'm only running my gtx 560ti since it adds to my total. Once I add another card, if it remains profitable, I am not going to run the gtx 560 for mining.

[INFRNL]

So it looks like the 5850/70 are the cards of choice? whats a good price to pay Used/new?

might have to give this a shot and see how it goes; just do not want to invest too much just in case

also do the 2gb cards benefit over the 1gb cards? Thanks

[L0$t Pr0PhEt]

I don't understand what is encouraging buyers to buy these? Its not like they are backed by gold or anything like that so the only thing that makes them valuable is relative rarity which, like collectables for example, doesn't mean anything.... once people loose interest and stop buying they become useless right? And as others have said it is a little worry-some what they are doing with the computational power... but I'd probably try it if I had an ati video card, switched to nvidia purely for gpugrid... :( I also couldn't sell this to my wife thats for sure...

I read on another forum that there is an anonymous marketplace (Silk Road) for drugs that only accepts Bitcoins. Maybe that's where all the bitcoins are going to :p:

[Otis11]

6950 Running 100%... Try this out for 2 weeks and if it works out I'll be upgrading pretty quick.

:up:

[[XC] Oj101]

Well my GTX480 is getting around 120Mhash per second, I think I'll grab a 5870 or 5970 soon. If this falls over within two months I can sell them for the same price I paid or even more (no loss), if it falls over after two months... Well they'll pay for themselves within the first month and I can sell them afterwards anyway :)

[jcool]

actually thats perfect and it should be added in jcool's original post so we dont have 1 person each page asking what are the "wu". Did settled it up on my hd5770 rig ( i5-760 crunching also on wcg but brother daily rig so he sometime shut it off the damm :banana:) and my hd5670 rig (i3-530 that i got from whitefiredragon a while ago [thanks again mate] dedicated wcg cruncher) for a nice 210-250 mhash/sec output. Will help pay the bill that a university student can have( starting next september in litterature here in quebec) and maybe add another cruncher with a hd5870 or hd6970

Just did, thanks rcofell! :up:
Bitcoin still increasing in value, now at almost 18€ per BCT. If I were to sell the 10 BCT I made in the last 2 days, that would be 180€ :cool:
And this was just using my existing hardware, new cards won't arrive till Monday.

Also, here's a vid about bitcoin if u still wanna know more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwNfBgwbqng

[Reflex1]

my 2x 480gtx's have been at it for 2 days and still no buttcoins ...nVidia owners are left out i guess :rolleyes:

[jcool]

Not left out, no - it's just down to the architecture. A 5870 has 1600 stream shaders that can all be utilized for hashing, whereas a GTX 480 "only" has 480 stream units. Sure, they are organized differently, and in most cases, the Nvidia shaders are more effective, but not where sheer brute force is required (also see milkyway@home and Collatz). If it makes you feel any better - even the most powerful CPU miner is slower than your Nvidia cards. Dual Hexacore @ 4Ghz gives 28mHash/s... so yeah, definitely leave the CPUs on WCG.

[RADCOM]

A few questions for y'all
1)Is it feasible to make a portable mining rig from a shuttle like PC ( i.e micro ATX sandbridge)
2) is it okay to stop and start the client?
3)Are the figures based on running it 24/7?
4)what sort of internet connection is required?

[artemm]

Been at this for about two months, not sure how I feel about its long term stability.

Currently doing 2.9 Ghash/sec with 2x5970 and 2x 5870 mining at BTCmine

Argh.. Deux. I realized what was up shortly after I sold you that 5970. Well played, you bastage, well played :rofl:

[SMTB1963]

All I know is that RIGHT NOW, it does generate some instant money if you already have the right hardware.

Can't argue with that. Looks like a lot of folks here will be able to make an easy buck or two...at least for now. ;) (very nice write-up BTW)


Lemme know if this is too wordy of an attempt at explanation :)

One of the better synopsis I've read so far on the mechanics of bitcoin computation, and I've been following this for a while. "Nakamoto's" original paper here (http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf), if anyone's interested. It really is a spectacularly ingenious system. It's radical decentralization is basically the antithesis of current regimes, and distinguishes bitcoin from other virtual currencies. But in the long run I think it carries the seeds of it's own destruction - even in the unlikely event that The Man takes no action against it.

Undoubtedly the near term looks pretty rosy for miners, as long as they don't run afoul of their local tax laws.

[OldChap]

Best retail price here around $260 for a 5870 so I just ordered the one to trial this for now. It should be here Tuesday.

[Otis11]

How long does it normally take for them to show up?

And they show up in the wallet app we have right?

[Tom128]

I just got a second 5850 and was trying to set it up. I see reference that having them setup in XFire isn't as good, however I can't get the second card to show up without enabling it. I connected my second monitor to the second card as well with no change.

EDIT: I will say the performance seems the same with XFire enabled. I just can't set the cards to their own clocks/fan speeds it seems. I think my new card can OC alot better so I will be trying to figure this out today. Need to dig out my waterblock too.

[nanoprobe]

What would be the minimum card that would work effectively on this?

[ggdh]

Strange.

I moved my 5870 to another computer and although i did everything as for first rig now windows (xp 32bit) is not able to recognize this card. "No OpenCL device".
I have 10.5 and SDK 2.1 from jcool's link. Re-installation did not help.

[Fhqwhgads6680]

Strange.

I moved my 5870 to another computer and although i did everything as for first rig now windows (xp 32bit) is not able to recognize this card. "No OpenCL device".
I have 10.5 and SDK 2.1 from jcool's link. Re-installation did not help.

one thing I noticed, as jcool mentioned, if no monitor is hooked up to the card it won't recognize it, and on the same note if you try to set it up via RDP or vnc etc it won't notice it because it's not recognizing a monitor connected.

[joshd]

Well, I picked up a pair of 5870s, at current rates they should pay for themselves in 3 weeks. :D

[ggdh]

Windows sees it. But guiminer was not able to run mining using it. I had to reinstall drivers and had to go with, supposedly slower, 11.2. Now works fine. And I moved my card to my office computer so no ... bills ;)

[INFRNL]

going off current rates; is it still better to get a 5850/5870 rather than the newer 6950? The 6950 is close the the same cost as a 5850 but newer tech:shrug:
In the long run I wonder if changes will be made and the newer cards will be more beneficial. any thoughts?
I might buy a used 5850 for a decent price I think

Thanks

[zalbard]

Performance-wise Cayman and Cypress are actually pretty close. For example, 6970 @ stock does 380 Mhash/sec. Cypress should be slightly cheaper and more energy-effective, though.

[06F150fx4]

so..5 hd5830's on the way. Damn you XS.... :rofl:

[INFRNL]

Performance-wise Cayman and Cypress are actually pretty close. For example, 6970 @ stock does 380 Mhash/sec. Cypress should be slightly cheaper and more energy-effective, though.

I am not really familiar with ATI; so I take it Cypress is 69xx?

I have the chance to pick up a 5870 for $175 plus shipping; does this sound like a fair price? Or should I spend the $2-250 for 69xx?

Thanks

[kjeldoran]

I am not really familiar with ATI; so I take it Cypress is 69xx?

I have the chance to pick up a 5870 for $175 plus shipping; does this sound like a fair price? Or should I spend the $2-250 for 69xx?

Thanks

Cayman=69xx
Cypress=58xx

Can't say about the price, but I think $175 is a good deal.

[Deux]

I am not really familiar with ATI; so I take it Cypress is 69xx?

I have the chance to pick up a 5870 for $175 plus shipping; does this sound like a fair price? Or should I spend the $2-250 for 69xx?

Thanks

That's a killer deal these days, most are $250+

[06F150fx4]

I dunno, I got the 5830's for 109.99 a piece.

[shoota]

Ok so i've been at this for two and half days and I'm not seeing anything in my Bitcoin app. Do I need to do anything special or do I just need to wait?

[INFRNL]

I dunno, I got the 5830's for 109.99 a piece.

how is the 5830 compared to a 5870? I think I can get new 5830's for around $100-$110 as you mentioned.

6950 after rebate is anywhere from $210 up

I think the 5870 produces more than the 6950 though:shrug:
Its a tough decision. I'd just hate to buy an old card and find out I should have went with the newer 69xx card; which is why I am asking you guys.

$175 plus shipping will probably put me around $190 shipped; so for approx $20 more I could get a 1gb 6950. For approx $50 more I believe would get me a 2GB 6950

can the current 2Gb 6950's still be unlocked to 6970's? I think these are the cards I read about a while back:shrug:

Thanks

[06F150fx4]

how is the 5830 compared to a 5870? I think I can get new 5830's for around $100-$110 as you mentioned.




If you go by the chart, the 5830 will do anywhere from 250-320 mega hash for 110 bucks. The 5870 does 315-440, depending on clocks. Depends on the number of free pci express slots you have though.

[INFRNL]

If you go by the chart, the 5830 will do anywhere from 250-320 mega hash for 110 bucks. The 5870 does 315-440, depending on clocks. Depends on the number of free pci express slots you have though.

Thats what I was just looking at. I have 2 sr-2's and will have a SB after I ship out my X58 this week. So bottom line is that I have plenty of slots.

So at a price/performance look; you route is the better way to go. I can get 2x 5830's for we'll say $220 and produce 500+ where as a 5870 will produce roughly 400 for approx $190.

Looks like multiple 5830's will produce more for the money; unless one starts to rack up the 5850/70 or 69xx's.

may just have to pick up a couple 5830's instead. will have to think about this for a few and see what route I want to take.

Thanks

[Red Maw]

I am not really familiar with ATI; so I take it Cypress is 69xx?

I have the chance to pick up a 5870 for $175 plus shipping; does this sound like a fair price? Or should I spend the $2-250 for 69xx?

Thanks

For that price I'd jump on a (good) 5870 instantly.


Ok so i've been at this for two and half days and I'm not seeing anything in my Bitcoin app. Do I need to do anything special or do I just need to wait?

With BTC Guild there's a little "pay me now" button that you need to push to have your earned coins "deposited" to your "wallet".

[shoota]

With BTC Guild there's a little "pay me now" button that you need to push to have your earned coins "deposited" to your "wallet".

Thank you! I saw that but I wasn't sure that would do it.

[Duh]

No way to find out how much the project is gonna last?



thx

EDIT : guys: does this (http://bit.ly/gT0HgB)tell you something? ( if not, send me your VGA ´s LOL)

EDIT2: the proof thingy was for the mj12 guys

[INFRNL]

For that price I'd jump on a (good) 5870 instantly.

Thanks for the input, but I am now wondering if I should go for 2x5830's for more production. ie 2x 5830=$220 new or 5870 for approx $190 used...then there is 6950 2Gb for approx $230AR I believe.
2x5830 according to the chart will produce quite a bit more than anything else comparable in price:shrug:

[shoota]

Thanks for the input, but I am now wondering if I should go for 2x5830's for more production. ie 2x 5830=$220 new or 5870 for approx $190 used...then there is 6950 2Gb for approx $230AR I believe.
2x5830 according to the chart will produce quite a bit more than anything else comparable in price:shrug:

Which is why we are ordering them. Honestly, I'm shocked newegg still has those 5830's in stock

[KaptainBlaZzed]

Which is why we are ordering them. Honestly, I'm shocked newegg still has those 5830's in stock

snagged 2 of them tonight. :D

[INFRNL]

Which is why we are ordering them. Honestly, I'm shocked newegg still has those 5830's in stock


snagged 2 of them tonight. :D

so your telling me to pass on the 5870 and pick up a couple 5830's, correct?:ROTF: Wish I had more $$$. I do not own credit; so its whats in the bank

also agree bout NE having them in stock; I think everyone else is out or wants a rediuculous amount. TD has some for $100 after rebate, but one brand is XFX which I am leary about after reading a thread here on XS

so off to order 2 from NE and skip the 5870, yes?

EDIT: they have at least 100 in stock

[[XC] gomeler]

Just ordered 8 of those.. I thought I was all smart about it until I noticed you guys are ordering them too :D

[Otis11]

Another question... Can a TX650 handle 3 6950s? If so I'll pick them up tomorrow... If not what would I need?

[INFRNL]

gomeler;4871722']Just ordered 8 of those.. I thought I was all smart about it until I noticed you guys are ordering them too :D

Holy crap...8 you crazy. If its too much heat for you; I'm just down the road around the bend in Colorado Springs:rofl:

@Otis: I think the 6950's use approx 200w's or so; not sure about 3 on 1 board though. I can't recall what the minimum PSU was recommended just for 1 card; I'm guessing 5-600. You might be pushing it with a 650w

[joshd]

Another question... Can a TX650 handle 3 6950s? If so I'll pick them up tomorrow... If not what would I need?

possibly if the cards are stock and the cpu is idle? Maybe just run 2 of them

I'm going for a pair of 5870s on a corsair 650

[INFRNL]

Otis: I just saw a thread in the ATI area and they are saying 1KW for 3 6950's in Tri-CF

[Otis11]

Otis: I just saw a thread in the ATI area and they are saying 1KW for 3 6950's in Tri-CF

Ok, I'll be getting a new PSU the as well...

All I needed for a spending spree was a reason... I have a pay check now. :rofl:

[INFRNL]

Do you really want to get the 6950's or would you rather get the 5830's? not sure how many rigs you have, but the 5830's will allow for way more production for the price. for 3 6950's you could buy 7-8 5830's.

[[XC] gomeler]

Do you really want to get the 6950's or would you rather get the 5830's? not sure how many rigs you have, but the 5830's will allow for way more production for the price. for 3 6950's you could buy 7-8 5830's.

SHHHHH! I need to pay off my first batch and I want more available when I buy my second batch :D

[INFRNL]

gomeler;4871765']SHHHHH! I need to pay off my first batch and I want more available when I buy my second batch :D

:rofl: they have at least 100 left...not sure in a month though:shrug:

Think I will take 2 for now.

Going off the list; this is how I see it from the 3 listed cards:

$110 5830 cheap and will yied more production for the $ (approx 2.5m/$@275mhash)
$190 5870 next best card to have (@$190; 2.32m/$@440mhash/2.0@380mhash)
$250 6950 2gb (not sure how it would do flashed to 6970) (1.6m/$@400mhash)

[Alpha]

picked up a 5830 from the egg. now that my wife knows i can make from this, it should be nice while it lasts!

[INFRNL]

I just hope that NE doesn't raise the price because of the current amount of sales...our demand for them=NE bending us over as poking us in the...
Also hope these 5830's produce like we think they will:shrug:

according to the list; they should put out 250-300ish mhash/s and someone said $1/mhash, but another member said these will only produce approx $125=something doesn't add up

I also need to check how much a 5870 will make; chart lists 315-440

I might just pick up that 5870 while I can and get some 5830's as I get more money since they are readily available for the time being

[[XC] Oj101]

I missed out on a local supplier clearing out their inventory of 5870s at $134 :shakes:

[[XC] hipno650]

ok question for you guys. So I have my 5870 running away and it all seems find and dandy and it's conecting to everything blah blah. BUT how do I get my money? places like Mt. Gox seems pretty straight forward but there seems to only be options for people in the states and kinda of people in Europe. what about for those of us that live in Canada? I can't just cook up a Dwolla account as that seems to be US only. Anyone form Canada figure it out?

this seems GREAT as current rates peg my 5870 at almost $500 a month... and I have another one on the way not to mention other AMD goodies sitting around. all I need to do is figure out how us Canadians can get the cash and we are all good:)

edit: hmmm it seems I can transform the bitcoins into virtual credit cards, which I could transfer into my paypal account.... but I suspect that paypal might get irritated if I start adding 5 new credit cards per month and swiftly taking the money and dumping into my bank account.

I am still looking for a more direct method

[INFRNL]

Oj101;4871802']I missed out on a local supplier clearing out their inventory of 5870s at $134 :shakes:
:shocked:; that really sucks. I would have been all over that deal. I would be happy at even $150

hipno650;4871817']ok question for you guys. So I have my 5870 running away and it all seems find and dandy and it's conecting to everything blah blah. BUT how do I get my money? places like Mt. Gox seems pretty straight forward but there seems to only be options for people in the states and kinda of people in Europe. what about for those of us that live in Canada? I can't just cook up a Dwolla account as that seems to be US only. Anyone form Canada figure it out?

this seems GREAT as current rates peg my 5870 at almost $500 a month... and I have another one on the way not to mention other AMD goodies sitting around. all I need to do is figure out how us Canadians can get the cash and we are all good:)

edit: hmmm it seems I can transform the bitcoins into virtual credit cards, which I could transfer into my paypal account.... but I suspect that paypal might get irritated if I start adding 5 new credit cards per month and swiftly taking the money and dumping into my bank account.

I am still looking for a more direct method

I do not run this yet; so I am of no help to you. I'm sure someone will chime in sometime today to help you out.

I'm at a loss of what I want to do; I'm down to just buying 2x 5830's right now or buying that 5870 and buying some 5830's sometime this month. it might also be better to just buy 2x5830 now and I can also get a couple more later this month.about the same cost, but if this all works out 4x 5830 will be better than 2x5830 and 1 5870 going by the chart:shrug:

[[XC] Oj101]

As I'm in South Africa and the only way I'd be able to receive payment for BTC is PayPal... And there aren't any sites which trade BTC for payment into a PayPal account... Would anybody be willing to do the sales for me and PayPal to me?

[[XC] hipno650]

Oj101;4872029']As I'm in South Africa and the only way I'd be able to receive payment for BTC is PayPal... And there aren't any sites which trade BTC for payment into a PayPal account... Would anybody be willing to do the sales for me and PayPal to me?

I did some more looking last night and I did find an exchange site that will turn it into paypal as recommended by Bitcoin themselves however the exchange rate was much worse than other sites. Most places are trading Bitcoins for 18ish USD while if doing paypal I would only get 14USD per Bitcoin. Seems better than nothing though. I will keep looking unless someone knows an easy way.

[[XC] Oj101]

Which site was that? Three days ago it was about $8/BTC, so $14 is nice :D

[MadHacker]

I went with the 5830, I just ordered 7 of them. Best bang for buck for inital cost, power consumption or overall return in investment.
the 5870 came in second and 6990 came in third from my calculations.

[karbonkid]

Windows sees it. But guiminer was not able to run mining using it. I had to reinstall drivers and had to go with, supposedly slower, 11.2. Now works fine. And I moved my card to my office computer so no ... bills ;)

Surely that's fraud/theft...

[[XC] Oj101]

Ok, I want to try Mt Gox but how do I move my coins there? How do I tie it to a PP account?

[Alpha]

you have to create an account at MT Gox, then you can add bitcoins - you send them to an address it gives you. as for retreiving funds, the closest thing i found to paypal was the dwolla.com account. im in the process of getting mine verifed.

I think mtgox only accepts bitcoins >= 1

[INFRNL]

You guys r killing me. Just ordered 2 5830; there r only 12 left now

[KaptainBlaZzed]

Oj101;4872134']Ok, I want to try Mt Gox but how do I move my coins there? How do I tie it to a PP account?

You send the BTC on MyGox, they will provide you and address.
You do not use a PP account, you use a Dwolla account.

Dwolla is a new paypal without all the BS.

i sold my first 6 BTC today for $107. :D

[Tom128]

You guys r killing me. Just ordered 2 5830; there r only 12 left now

8 left now :D


You send the BTC on MyGox, they will provide you and address.
You do not use a PP account, you use a Dwolla account.

Dwolla is a new paypal without all the BS.

i sold my first 6 BTC today for $107. :D

How long did it take you to get the money from MtGox to Dwolla? I sold my first last night and it still says $0.00 in my dwolla account. Hopefully it clears soon. I am glad this is legit, so I can turn my crunchers back on and hopefully afford to upgrade them.

[artemm]

You maniacs, you killed Newegg's 5830 supply in a matter of minutes. :rofl:

[Rob_B]

Like crunching wasn't enough. Should get a 5850 card tomorrow and have a look at this bitcoin thing.:yepp:

[[XC] gomeler]

8 left now :D



How long did it take you to get the money from MtGox to Dwolla? I sold my first last night and it still says $0.00 in my dwolla account. Hopefully it clears soon. I am glad this is legit, so I can turn my crunchers back on and hopefully afford to upgrade them.

Out of stock. I went to go order another 8 to find there are none available :(

[Sparky]

Screw the heat I'm trying this on my 4870 tonight.

[OldChap]

gomeler;4872259']Out of stock. I went to go order another 8 to find there are none available :(

Who was being greedy then?

I reckon anyone finding a source is going to keep quiet until they have all they can get :)

[[XC] gomeler]

Who was being greedy then?

I reckon anyone finding a source is going to keep quiet until they have all they can get :)

Greedy? I have a tax return that should be working for me and this beats stocks :D

[Tom128]

Man I just don't have the $$$ on hand to compete with some of you lol, even if this were guaranteed to last long enough to pay for itself (which I hope it does)

[shoota]

Crap I knew I should've ordered more than two lol!

[KaptainBlaZzed]

8 left now :D



How long did it take you to get the money from MtGox to Dwolla? I sold my first last night and it still says $0.00 in my dwolla account. Hopefully it clears soon. I am glad this is legit, so I can turn my crunchers back on and hopefully afford to upgrade them.

The money was in my Dwolla account in less than 1 minute, i then transferred it to my bank account. Have not received the funds into the bank account yet.

[Alpha]

glad i got mine ordered at 3 am! now to wait for shipping.... wife was a bit upset at me, but she'll get over it when i sell some bitcoins for some cash!

[p2501]

Ordered parts for a rig based on two 6990 now because 5870s and 5850s supplies for sane prices are exhausted here. Hopefully all goes well.. it would be nice if we had dwolla here too. :(

Also I asked my moms tax consultant just now to be on the safe side. She never heard of btc but she tried to classify it anyway. First, there is no national law for or against it, so it's neither legal or illegal. To the eye of The Man it doesn't exist atm since there is no law to classify it (it's difficult to say if it's renting out your computer, there's no one to rent it to, it's a pool of equal minded people but no one owns it being p2p; it may be money exchange for profit but then your computers inital cost and utility bill wouldn't fit, also btc don't really exist, it's just virtual; it is no casual income, you don't do any work and you're not paid by anyone so you're not paying any income taxes either; etc...)

She will however ask lawyer friends of her to make sense of this. In the mean time she said that one should keep track of all expenses and earnings, document everything for personal use just to be on the safe side in case later on someone knocks on your door. And amounts transfered should be also kept low. If I get further input I'll keep you updated, it'd be interested to have some input from other countries also since btc is kind of meta/transnational.. :shrug::up:

[KaptainBlaZzed]

What pool is everybody joining?

I am currently in the Bitcoinpool.com pool.

[[XC] Oj101]

dwolla is not available in South Africa. Can someone tell me how I can receive funds from this? My only option is PayPal here...

[ggdh]

Guys, i need an advice: cheap mobo+cpu combo to run 3/4 GPUs. And two 5830s on their way :hehe:

[Tom128]

The money was in my Dwolla account in less than 1 minute, i then transferred it to my bank account. Have not received the funds into the bank account yet.

Well that kind of makes me worried to try sending today's profit then. It's nearly 24 hours now and it's not showing in my balance or pending. It shows up in my MtGox transaction history though. My only thought is that I had made the account literally a minute or two before I tried to send to it, maybe the account was not available for sending to yet, and the transaction was lost. Though I would have hoped the money would have bounced back into my MtGox account.

[OldChap]

Ordered parts for a rig based on two 6990 now because 5870s and 5850s supplies for sane prices are exhausted here...

What prices do you see now? What are the cheapest there?

[Deux]

For those outside of the US, I'll buy USD on MtGox with paypal at $0.95 on the dollar if anyone is interested in a simple quick way to cash out :)

Grabbed 5 5830s and a PSU on friday :D

[p2501]

What prices do you see now? What are the cheapest there?

€260-270 for any card in reference layout, but not in any numbers. For this price I can get half of a 6990 which makes the 6990 more interesting since they're said to be a bit more efficient in pure mh/watt. They're listed for less sometimes, but those are either out of stock or non-reference.

5850 are sometimes up to 5870 prices lol. Maybe I should buy some more 6990s for later before they're out of stock or out of my price range. :shrug:

[INFRNL]

I might be able to get a 5850 for....$50. Will let you guys know:rofl::p:

[KaptainBlaZzed]

For those outside of the US, I'll buy USD on MtGox with paypal at $0.95 on the dollar if anyone is interested in a simple quick way to cash out :)

Grabbed 5 5830s and a PSU on friday :D

I would be willing to preform the same service for our fellow crunchers outside the US.


i see the process going something like this:
You sell your BTC on MtGox.
You transfer the USD to my Dwolla Acct.
I will transfer the same amount less 5% to your Paypal account as a gift.

let me know if anybody is interested, or if you can figure a way to preform this transaction another way.

[Deux]

I would be willing to preform the same service for our fellow crunchers outside the US.


i see the process going something like this:
You sell your BTC on MtGox.
You transfer the USD to my Dwolla Acct.
I will transfer the same amount less 5% to your Paypal account as a gift.

let me know if anybody is interested, or if you can figure a way to preform this transaction another way.

Yeah thats basically how it would work, it is also possible to just send USD on mtgox and avoid dwolla all together.

Also willing to consider buying BTC directly for paypal depending on price and reputation.

[jcool]

Everyone's getting hyped I see - about time ;)
By the way, I wouldn't recommend 5830's unless you can't get 5850's or 5870's at a decent price. The 5830 is severely crippled vs. the 5850 and 5870. It's got a significantly lower shader and texture unit count, as ROPs at 16 are half as many as the 5850/70 have. I have been buying new 5850's at 110€/piece around here, which can do around 360-370 mHash with some overclocking.

[p2501]

I have been buying new 5850's at 110€/piece around here

Local shops?

[artemm]

Everyone's getting hyped I see - about time ;)
By the way, I wouldn't recommend 5830's unless you can't get 5850's or 5870's at a decent price. The 5830 is severely crippled vs. the 5850 and 5870. It's got a significantly lower shader and texture unit count, as ROPs at 16 are half as many as the 5850/70 have. I have been buying new 5850's at 110€/piece around here, which can do around 360-370 mHash with some overclocking.

I have to agree with this. I looked at the 5830 and it's beaten by a 5850 or a discounted 5870 when you consider power consumption (not electrical cost, but the cost of the PSU you'll need to power your cards) water block cost (if you choose to WC) and slot population.

Depending on how long this bubble lasts (or whether it is a bubble at all) I think going WC with 5870 is the way to go. The power consumption per card is almost the same (so you can throw more cards on a single reasonably powerful PSU) and you can push them harder with water. My 5870 overclocks very well on water while it wasn't possible with air. Also, converting to water gets the card down to 1 slot, allowing you to cram more GPUs on a single board. You can get as many cards onto a board as there are PCI-E slots, just plug a DIY dummy plug into the card and it'll be detected. Here's how: http://www.overclock.net/folding-home-guides-tutorials/384733-30-second-dummy-plug.html

[Alpha]

i plan on moving up to some 5870's or 6870's when the income hits. i needed something to get my feet off the ground.

[OldChap]

Which cards are reference and which not? anyone care to list a few? I'm talking 5870 or 5850's

I have been wondering why some cards are 30% plus more than others is this the reason?

[[XC] Oj101]

For those outside of the US, I'll buy USD on MtGox with paypal at $0.95 on the dollar if anyone is interested in a simple quick way to cash out :)

Grabbed 5 5830s and a PSU on friday :D

Ok, I clicked Pay Me Now and it transfered 0.41 BTC to my wallet. Where is my wallet? How do I move BTC from my wallet to Mt Gox?

[artemm]

Which cards are reference and which not? anyone care to list a few? I'm talking 5870 or 5850's

I have been wondering why some cards are 30% plus more than others is this the reason?

I know gigabyte and asus make non-reference cards. A rule of thumb: if it's a reference looking cooler (single fan, red stripe running down it) then it's a reference card. If it's a double/triple/whatever fan, odd-looking heatsink, then it's not reference (and can't be water cooled, of course.) YMMV.

Also, look just above the PCI-E connector on the card. If you see an AMD logo, chances are the PCB is reference.

EK's configuration tool is good, but their database is a little weak.

[KaptainBlaZzed]

Everyone's getting hyped I see - about time ;)
By the way, I wouldn't recommend 5830's unless you can't get 5850's or 5870's at a decent price. The 5830 is severely crippled vs. the 5850 and 5870. It's got a significantly lower shader and texture unit count, as ROPs at 16 are half as many as the 5850/70 have. I have been buying new 5850's at 110€/piece around here, which can do around 360-370 mHash with some overclocking.

I can find 5850's local for $200 - $300 and 5870's for $370 - $500

those are some good prices.

[[XC] gomeler]

I can find 5850's local for $200 - $300 and 5870's for $370 - $500

those are some good prices.

Yeah, that's dirt cheap for HD 5850s. I opted for the HD5830s b/c at $110/pop it was hard to beat. I bought a pair of HD 5850s for $165 used but I'm pretty certain they aren't worth 50% more MH/s according to the numbers I've seen.

I've been basing my calculations off of this chart -> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

I figure 1GHz on the HD 5830 should be do able on the stock cooler. At that point it'll be generating roughly 300MH/s versus 382MH/s with a 995MHz HD 5850. I'm banking on being able to run these cards with just a thermal paste change at 1GHz. We'll see in 3 days :D

Now that the HD 5830s are out I've started searching for HD 5850s. I've also been searching for single-slot HD 5770s but unless they are sub-$100 I don't think they're a smart choice.

[shoota]

Well that kind of makes me worried to try sending today's profit then. It's nearly 24 hours now and it's not showing in my balance or pending. It shows up in my MtGox transaction history though. My only thought is that I had made the account literally a minute or two before I tried to send to it, maybe the account was not available for sending to yet, and the transaction was lost. Though I would have hoped the money would have bounced back into my MtGox account.

With dwolla you should need to verify your account first by getting two small deposits in your account and then entering those in the appropriate section of your dwolla account.