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

[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..

[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?

[Tom128]

Whoa... really?

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.

[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?!

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.

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.

[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