What is Bit Coin and can you make real money through Mining?

[Kensek]

Can someone please explain this to me and why people are buying used HD6990s on eBay for $1,000 to do this.

[OldChap]

You have heard of Folding and Crunching?

In principle this is similar ...You use your graphics cards (best are ati) to do "work" for which you get paid Bitcoins. These can be exchanged for your local currency.

Make money? to put things into perspective, just now (and things are constantly changing) a single hd 5870 running 24/7 will earn maybe 0.28 coins a day which before you pay for the electricity costs would be maybe $4.60

So, if you had a load of cards you could make a whole bunch of cash. Be aware though, the value of coins is volatile so you probably don't want to invest in cards costing $1000 unless you can wait over 100 days before you have recouped your investment.

[Kensek]

Thank you for the info.

Every now and then I get a HD6990 and I sell it on eBay.

Prior to the one I sold today, I sold one 4 weeks back.

And it went to a guy who owns a big car dealership in New Jersey.

And looking at his eBay feedback he bought everyone on eBay for the past 2 weeks.

This person bought 20 of them ranging from $700 - $850.

And now I see that HD6990 are going for $825 - $1050 on eBay.

So I was curious how people make money doing this and how much.

[ggdh]

There are people out there who already spent tens of thousands of $ on bitcoin hardware. PITA that most of us didn't know about this a year ago (when the difficulty allowed for mining tens of coins on a single card / DAY )

[don_xvi]

Remember that those plentiful coins were selling for pennies. It would have been a good time to mine & hold, but then you need confidence the product will take off and be worth many times more somewhere in the future.